Microsoft Releases Office Web Apps on SkyDrive

Microsoft is announcing the availability of Office Web Apps on SkyDrive for users in select countries. The platform gives users the ability to view and edit Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote documents online, via the browser. Microsoft hopes that such cloud functionality will give it an edge in the battle against Google Apps and similar Web-based productivity suites, which occupy a small portion of the market but threaten to increase their share in coming years. Microsoft made Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 available to business customers starting May 12, with consumer rollout of the software scheduled for June.

Microsoft announced June 7 the availability of Office Web
Apps on SkyDrive for users in the United States, the United
Kingdom, Canada and Ireland. The ability to view and edit Word,
PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote documents online, via the browser, precedes the
consumer release of Office 2010 by a week, and suggests the importance that
Microsoft has placed on a more cloud-based strategy for some of its flagship
products.
Users can access the stripped-down, Web-based versions of
those productivity programs via Office.Live.com. Once there, they can upload
documents to the cloud, view and edit those documents, and collaborate on Excel
and OneNote files in real-time. In addition, Microsoft provides the capability
to view Word and PowerPoint documents on most smartphones. Two sub-features
include version history, which allows the user to cycle through older edits of
documents, and enhanced search, a more comprehensive drill-down into currently
stored files.

Microsoft made Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 available to
business customers starting May 12, with a consumer rollout of the software
scheduled for later in June. As with Windows 7, Microsoft faces the challenge
of convincing users that Office 2010 is worth the upgrade from previous
iterations; unlike Windows 7, which justified its existence as a replacement
for the maligned Windows Vista and the aging-but-stable Windows XP, Office
succeeds a stable and well-regarded release.

With that in mind, Microsoft has been pushing Office 2010 as
the answer to a changing workplace. "Our employees expect the same technologies
at home as in the marketplace," Stephen Elop, president of Microsoft's Business
Division, told an audience during the software's official New York unveiling on
May 12. "They want all of these technologies to work very well and seamlessly together."
According to Gartner, Microsoft
held 94.23 percent of the productivity-software market in 2009, as measured
by revenue. That represented a slight dip from 2007, when the company held 94.6
percent of the market. While that dwarfs competitors' share, including Google
with 0.09 percent, Microsoft also has cause for concern in the rise of
cloud-based productivity apps by Google and other companies, which threaten to
increase their market share as consumers and businesses gravitate toward a
more Web-based lifestyle.
Office Web Apps represents Microsoft's attempt to
counterprogram Google Apps and other cloud-based programs. While the applications
available through the browser are stripped-down, Microsoft is touting the
ability of Office Web Apps combined with Office 2010 to enable off-line
editing, and to co-author Word and PowerPoint documents using revision marks
and rich features.
Microsoft's TechEd Conference, running June 7-11 in New
Orleans, has presented an opportunity for the company to tout its upcoming
platforms to both developers and enterprise customers. Other products being
pushed during the gathering's first days include Windows Phone 7, which
Microsoft hopes will compete effectively against both Apple and Google, despite
CEO Steve Ballmer's recent admission of the company's missteps in the mobile
space.

Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Playboy, WebMD, AARP the Magazine, AutoWeek, Washington City Paper, Trader Monthly, and Private Air. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.